Can Someone Else’s Poop Help Diabetes?

The sheer volume of what’s being discovered now about how the bacteria in our gut determine our physical and mental health is overwhelming. Literally, if your gut bacteria are screwed up, this can be linked with many different diseases and being overweight. Hence, if you remove the “ick” factor, it makes sense that if you took gut bacteria from a healthy person and transplanted it into someone who is sick, this may help the recipient. This morning’s study authors did just that with patients who had type-2 diabetes, and what they found may rock the foundations of the pharma world.

If it’s not just about diet, what can we do to make our gut bacteria healthy? To control blood sugar and weight, probiotic supplements containing the more common bacterial strains (e.g., Lactobacillus paracasei, Lactobacillus rhamnosus, and Bifidobacterium animalis) have been shown to be beneficial, and these strains also help regulate gut inflammation.

I’ll get to the study in a moment, but first let’s look at more links between health and our gut bacteria.

Study Review: Treating Diabetes with Healthy Poop

In the new study, researchers investigated insulin resistance in two groups of obese male subjects with metabolic syndrome. Their focus was a procedure called FMT that has been used for the last decade to treat severe and life-threatening bacteria overgrowth in the gut called C. difficile. FMT stands for fecal microbiota transplant. Basically, the poop of a healthy person is transplanted into the colon of the sick person to “reboot” the gut bacteria.

In this study, one group of diabetic patients received healthy donor (“lean donor”) feces while the other group did not, and subjects in both groups continued their regular diets. Six weeks following the FMT, the donor-feces group experienced significant improvements in insulin sensitivity. This means that insulin that wasn’t working well to lower blood sugar got better at that job. The group also experienced metabolic benefits associated with greater diversity in the gut bacteria. These positive changes to the gut microbiome were not found in the other group.

Researchers concluded that the gut bacteria of those who are obese and have metabolic syndrome can be improved by implanting stool from a healthy, lean donor! The benefits were not long-term and ended when the subjects’ microbiome returned to the prestudy baseline condition. While not a permanent solution to an important quest to improve your gut bacteria, the results give much needed additional information.

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Susan,
That’s a great question! The technique used was not mentioned in the study. However, fecal transplantation is already used to treat C diff colitis, which can cause life threatening diarrhea. This is how it’s done for that purpose: Fecal Microbiota Transplant is a procedure in which fecal matter, or stool, is collected from a tested donor, mixed with a saline or other solution, strained, and placed in a patient, by colonoscopy, enema, endoscopy, or sigmoidoscopy.

Chris Centeno, M.D. is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. Centeno regularly lectures on regenerative medicine and has spoken twice at the Vatican Stem Cell Conference, as well as the NFL Combine.

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*DISCLAIMER: Like all medical procedures, Regenexx® Procedures have a success and failure rate. Patient reviews and testimonials on this site should not be interpreted as a statement on the effectiveness of our treatments for anyone else.